Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

1) Birth Death model will add many jobs
2) Seasonality is wacky this time of year
3) It takes 150K real jobs just to meet new workforce demands
4) Gov’t is adding census workers like mad (don’t know when that will hit the BS Report)

In an attempt to measure the extent of employee engagement around the world, the company polled more than 90,000 workers in 18 countries. The survey covered many of the key factors that determine workplace engagement, including: the ability to participate in decision-making, the encouragement given for innovative thinking, the availability of skill-enhancing job assignments and the interest shown by senior executives in employee well-being.

Here’s what the researchers discovered: barely one-fifth (21%) of employees are truly engaged in their work, in the sense that they would “go the extra mile” for their employer. Nearly four out of ten (38%) are mostly or entirely disengaged, while the rest are in the tepid middle.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it—this data represents a stinging indictment of the legacy management practices found in most companies.

At 6:30 PM CT (7:30 PM ET, 00:30 GMT), the White House issued the following short statement …

President Barack Obama will make a statement on the economy at 1940GMT [1440ET, 1340CT] today

As I understand the time line, the White House should have the complete payroll report by 7:30 PM ET. This is what makes the timing of this announcement so curious. Did they see the report, like it, and schedule a statement to gloat (”America is now creating jobs again”)? In other words, the report is better than expected and above zero.

Happened Before?

Last month Robert Gibbs said:

The White House has seen signs that the U.S. unemployment rate to be announced on Friday “might tick upward,” spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Thursday at a news briefing.

To this we said:

After this story made news, the White House decided to backtrack. Robert Gibbs says he did not see tomorrow’s number (CNBC claims they do not have it) and said he was projecting it from the ADP report. So does the press secretary have his own econometric models to predict the unemployment rate?

This apparent leak did not work out as expected. The unemployment rate did not “tick upward” by ticked down from 10.2% to 10.0% and the payroll report was better than expected at just -11,000.

In August Obama might have leaked the July report the night before when in a speech he said “We’re losing jobs at half the rate we were at the beginning of this year.”

This phrase is unique and the BLS report the next day had the following opening paragraph:

Nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline in July (-247,000), and the unemployment rate was little changed at 9.4 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The average monthly job loss for May through July (-331,000) was about half the average decline for November through April (-645,000). In July, job losses continued in many of the major industry sectors.

“Regular readers know that I don’t care much for NFP — its mostly noise — but the overall trend matters, not any given monthly datapoint”

I disagree. What really matters isn’t so much the trend itself, than it is the trend of how it gets corrected a few months later. When numbers get corrected on the downside, it means we’re still heading downhill; when it gets corrected on the upside, it means the situation is improving.

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About Barry Ritholtz

Ritholtz has been observing capital markets with a critical eye for 20 years. With a background in math & sciences and a law school degree, he is not your typical Wall St. persona. He left Law for Finance, working as a trader, researcher and strategist before graduating to asset managementRead More...

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"The largest Asian central banks have gone on record that they are curbing their purchases of US debt. And they are also diversifying their huge reserves, steadily moving away from the dollar. The risks have simply become too many and too serious." -W. Joseph StroupeEditor, Global Events

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